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Archive for October, 2010

I spent the weekend in St. Louis. I traveled there with my friends Star and Jay and Flat Stanley. If you don’t know who he is, look it up. Jay, who I thought liked me dubbed the trip ‘Driving Miss Owen’. At every stop he jumped from the vehicle and ran around to open my door as if I was too weak to open it for myself . My son, with whom I labored for 27.5 hours to bring into the world suggested that Jay rename the trip ‘Driving Miss Crazy’. What can I say? Children, they will break your heart every time.

But on to the real purpose of the trip; I had a book signing at a local store called the Mystic Valley in St. Louis, where I ran into some old friends, made new ones and sold some books, I met with my publisher, I filmed two video interviews to promote my books, and had dinner with M.R. Sellars and his family and some friends, twice. Now if your don’t know M.R. Sellars, he is a writer type guy and he writes murder/occult/pagan/horror stuff. He is one rather twisted guy, but nice enough. If you can overlook the fact that he know way too much about body decomposition, ways to kill people, what it takes to actually kill a human, will happily explain how the size of maggots on a body will tell you how long that body has been a body and is absolutely thrilled to look at crime scene photos. He also knows about vampires, serial killers and all manner long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night. I don’t know how he sleeps at night, and he probably leaves the light on if he does.

We had dinner at the Sellars house on Friday night, we ordered in pizza, more friends joined us, we laughed and drank away the evening and no bodies or murders were ever discussed.

On Saturday evening, we were invited for dinner again, which means that were nice enough on Friday, right? Despite the fact that the man writes horror stories for a living, he cooked dinner for us and we let him. Murv did the cooking and the fare was mostly vegeterian as he, his wife Kat, my traveling companion Star, and I are all heading in that direction. So we had roasted beets, grilled squash, sweet potatoes, wild rice with feta cheese and spinach, spagetti squash, roasted chick peas and grilled portobello mushrooms. I know I am leaving out several dishes but in short it was a feast! It was a lovely dinner, there were many great discussions, lots of stories, jokes and anecdotes. Sellars and I swapped horror stories about traveling to promote our books, I am sure that we were riveting to the others who were listening to us. We discussed the Pagan Unity Festival at length, what we all wanted to see for next year, things that we never wanted to see, potential guests to bring in as speakers and so on. There was much beer ingested and we made evil plans for the next day. All and all a good day.

Now I cannot tell you all the evil plans that we brought into reality on Sunday. I am sworn to secrecy. Just let me say that this involved Sellars, Me, Johnathan, Kat, Star, and cameras. No, you dirty minded people, we did not film porn. The rest of the participants aside, no one in their right minds would pay good money to see Sellars or me naked. Please. Our evilness made us laugh and laugh and we hope that it pleases all of you as well when it is revealed. There I have baited that hook.

On Sunday evening, after all of our hard work with cameras and scripts, we had dinner. Sellars warmed up the leftovers the night before. He added a Turkish dish that was in the fridge (what better time to get rid of leftovers than when guests are in the house right?), and combined that with some white rice. Again, we had a grand time only the crowd was smaller; Sellars, Kat, Willow, Star, Jay and myself.

About an hour after dinner, I began to feel sick to my stomach. Hard on the heels of that I developed severe pain in my stomach. I was feeling terrible and trying to decide if it was a gall bladder attack or a virus of some kind. We were all tired after the antics of the afternoon, and decided to take leave of our hosts at around 9:00 PM. At that point Sellars looked at me and asked, “Sweetie, are you alright?” I told him I was not and asked if he had any Tums. He did,I took them and we left. By the time we got to our hotel, which was about seven minutes away, I was really miserable. I staggered up to the room, Star gave me some peppermint for the nausea, and I lay down. We began to discuss what my aliment might be, had I eaten something that was causing the trouble and so forth. We decided there was not enough fat in the food I had eaten to cause a gall bladder issue and that the food we had eaten was left over from the night before, and I had not had any problems before. By now my upper lip was numb. “Except for the Turkish dish with rice”, I said. “What was in the rice?” asked Star. “Maybe Saffron,” I guessed. “Which comes from Crocuses,” she said. “Which are kin to…: I said, “Buttercups!!” we both shouted. Sellars had poisoned me! I am allergic, very allergic may I say to freakin’ buttercups. Most people think they are beautiful little spring flowers. I know better, I know that are evil little devils that want to kill me. Somehow they had recruited Sellars in their war against me!

So here is my warning to you; if you ever have dinner with a murder mystery/occult/pagan/horror type guy and he offers to cook, bring your own food.